Part 18: A night in the cells, meeting Mo-Dettes and a close shave with some Hampstead fascists.

 

There were two more notable shows with Wayne and the Chairs that year. The band didn’t have a big enough following to sell out the London Lyceum and John Curd, the promoter, suggested that we share a bill with The UK Subs, who similarly wouldn’t have drawn enough of a crowd on their own. It was a mistake, Wayne was greeted by cat calls and what I can only describe as homophobic and  Transphobic abuse by the Uk Subs crowd, and throughout the show they threw beer cans, half full glasses and anything else that wasn’t nailed down, at the band, I joined the stage crew clearing up the debris between songs. One can that hit Wayne direct, she picked up and hurled back in the direction it came from but it was impossible to see where the worst offenders were, I walked around the crowd and evicted at least three of the offenders. We were please to get out.

The rest of the UK shows went without much incident until  weeks later, the last date on that UK tour was at Brighton University. The Student Union hall was in the centre of campus and the night was a sell out, we had our usual sound and stage crew and Dave Lewis , who had become a close friend of the band was with us. As the band went on stage three plain clothes policeman came to see me with the promoter and said they had a warrant to arrest Wayne for 'grievous bodily harm' and they wanted her off stage to go with them.

I bargained to let them finish the show, suggesting what a bad press they would get at the university if they took her off mid show. Now Wayne was both pretty scary when crossed but essentially quite sensitive and the idea of being carted off to a cell in her stage gear, sweaty and dishevelled would have been really cruel. My idea was to get her back to the hotel for a shower and change and hope to delay the arrest till the following day. I asked Dave  to prepare a flight case for Wayne to get her off site towards the end of the encore and then face the music myself when she was found not to be there. I explained it all to Wayne and the band before they went back on for the encore and was sure I had it covered. 

What I didn't know was that Brighton was a police training centre and they had put in place a training exercise for the capture of dangerous terrorists and the whole place had trainee cops at every junction and entrance , a military style operation. Dave got caught wheeling the flight case off site and described the faces of the cops when Wayne popped up in full drag, make up smeared with sweat and fishnet tights with high heeled boots. They picked me up as I tried to disapear out of the fire exit. Dave and I spent the night in the police cells, Wayne was transferred to Bow Street nick. The rest of the band and crew made it out ok but  Dave and I were charged with obstruction and fined.

I went up to visit Wayne in Bow street and arranged a lawyer . The custody crew were appalling, didn't make any allowance for Wayne's gender issues and worse didn't allow a change of clothes or proper make up removal. She was a sad sight. It transpired that the one beer can that Wayne had thrown back at the Lyceum gig had hit a 15 year old punk who had travelled up from Bromley and cut her just above the eye. Her Father was a solicitor and the rest is history.

Kate and June from the Mo-Dettes told me they wanted a manager and suggested that I come and meet them all backstage at the Hammersmith Odeon where they were supporting The Specials.

Safari had hired Rick Rogers company Trigger to handle the press for the Electric Chairs  and I would spend time hanging out there mainly because of an amorous fixation with his partner Juliette and partly because of Rick’s involvement with the fledgling 2 Tone label, the Coventry bands and Madness. Juliette used to phone me late evenings and chat for hours, she’d sometimes call and just ask me to talk, tell stories of travelling. I did fall in love. 

She was instrumental in a number of things, firstly she didn’t like staying over with me at Dick’s flat, my bed was in the living room so I had to wait for everyone who was there to leave and for Dick to go to bed before we had any privacy. If you needed the toilet you had to go through Dicks bedroom to the bathroom. We sometimes met in the daytime and she would occasionally meet journalists there, with me as chaperone, as they may have thought they would get more than a press release if they met her alone. She was a bit gorgeous and very ambitious. I’d spend evenings at her council flat in West Hampstead that she shared with her sister Sarah and her then photographer boyfriend, Ray. The place was always abuzz with people they were working with.

It was just down the road from the Moonlight Club and one evening, when the Specials had played there, Juliette and Sarah were walking home with, I think, Lynval ( I was already at the flat) a bunch of local skinheads started shouting racist abuse and telling him to ‘ leave our  white girls alone’ it got very ugly and  he had to run, he dived into a flat on the ground floor and took some knives from the kitchen and brandished them at the crowd of kids to clear his way back up to the apartment where we let him in and hid him in the sitting room, very wound up. About 5 minutes later there was banging on the flat door and kitchen window, with about 12 people shouting bring out the * ( *n word deleted) cries of 'we are going to lynch him' etc. We were terrified, but I went into the kitchen and started talking to them, initially saying he wasn’t there and asking what the problem was. The young skinheads were joined by some of their parents all saying that he had attacked “their boys” like they were the innocent party. It took about half an hour to talk them down and eventually with Juliette and Sarah, we negotiated that if we gave them back the missing knives they would go home and leave us alone, “after all” they said , “we are neighbours.”

I knew that Wayne was going back to the states , I got a lot of stick from her because I wouldn’t represent her interests above those of the band, reminding her that my deal was to manage the whole band, it got quite vitriolic at the end, she felt I was conspiring with the band against her. I needed a new start, a complete band, starting out, no existing contracts, no previous managers, no solo Diva’s. 

I wanted to start from scratch . Juliette found me a flat in Kilburn Park Road and I set it up as a bedsit at the back and an office in the front room. It was perfect. After going to the dressing room at the Hammersmith Odeon, after the Mo-Dettes show, I suggested we all meet up at the new Kilburn office and work out what they wanted to do.

The Saturday that they were all coming turned out to be the same day that Hugh Cornwall and some of the Stranglers were playing a charity cricket match (honest) on the cricket pitch behind the office, so in a truly surreal manner I got Dick to get us on a guest list and we went into the discussion via a cricket match between the Stranglers and a variety of DJ’s and record company A & R men. We mutually agreed to work differently to everybody else, form a company as equal directors dividing any income equally after expenses. Rough Trade agreed to pay for a studio to record the first single.  I wanted to go back to Thomas’s but they insisted on yet another Welsh Hawkwind connection and we went down to Foel Studios in Wales to record White Mice and Masochistic Opposite.

Mo-Dettes